I am also relatively new to this whole twitter following even though I have a marketing screen and nice branding. Im still getting used to it the whole twitter thing. What Im not getting used to is the automated direct messages that come up at least in 1/3 people I twit follow. I do find them annoying as you might have already experienced as well because theyre not personal. Remember when email came out in like 1999 and was popularizing really fast. It was the cool thing, everyone loved email, it was extraordinary and amazing. But in 2002 it was quoted as time consuming and even work. So it no longer became a personalized message to someone but a form of communicating business messages and work and it became a nuisance to open. Dont get me wrong automating your messages via email and twitter is a great way to do nothing and have the system do the work for you. Do get me right though when I say that being more personal will get you more followers and will keep them.

There is an ongoing wave that is still rising and curling and on that wave Twitter is on top. Although on this rising tidal wave, the people that have direct message are usually affiliating those messages with a website or a make money from home, make $250k in 12 months and it does get annoying to users who are marketing their business. Do you think those twitter followers read any messages you send them? In my experiences, this is not the case. I have messages other online marketers like myself and even though their direct messages have reached me the first time, I havent got my 1st reply or my 2nd reply back from them. The case and point is if you dont brand yourself to your twitter followers and personalize your messages to them, you are the annoying one.

Im not saying that Automatic Messages are innately bad.

But obviously its not building your brand and your reputation online unless of course you just want to have the largest twitter following on the planet earth and you have nothing to market you just want the largest list ever. Good for you, but most people relate to other people who can relate to them back. Its a reciprocal thing and this goes for your @messages and what youre doing. In my humble opinion to this Twitter trend as I see it growing steadfast is this: personalize who you are or twitters will not listen to you. You will be a cow lost within the masses. You will be doing what everyone else is doing. Yes in some cases the automatic messages work and you will build leads. As it has worked for me in the past, it ended up getting 2 or 3 leads from twitter solely when I used Twitter strategies to attract more traffic to my website.

Folks on Twitter seem to be against bad marketing as well.

And I truly mean this because recently I was so fed up receiving these messages in my email inbox of irrelevant crap that I turned off all marketing. I dont even check my direct messages anymore. I do sort through the ones I see as real people, but everyone else is just trying to sell you. I think it was Jeffrey Gitomer who said it this the best way: people hate being sold, but they love to buy. Case and point again, the folks on Twitter respond to Twitter as a form of Marketing. And just to test this theory before I wrote this article to prove myself right, I added 500 random strangers just from other followers that I have following me back. Out of those 500, only about 200 added me back while another 300 have no idea who I am and will probably never respond back to me. Out of those 200, and all the ones I visited, they are newbies with less than 200 followers and are very personalized (I think I visited like 5 profiles). Out of the 200 that added me back about 109 messages were Automatic Messages with Hi I hope you have a great day not very original in my opinion). Or Hey great to have another follower check this out www. again not very original.

Case and Point.
I think with any new culture in web 2.0, your brand is your power. People can see right through you when they think or they think they know they are being sold. Do the automated messages if they work for you, but you wont see any from me. My content is original, I dont post content about how you should try this or that website because itll make you millions of dollars. You can probably already do that. What I post is what Im doing. The fish I caught on the weekend, or the photo I took while I was at the beach. This kind of stuff brand the real person in you. Like I said, people relate to people not to what youre selling.